GIF Library

What are GIFs?

GIFs are a foundational part of our internet vocabulary. They are a form of communication, expression, performance, truly iconic and part of our cultural lexicon, but What are they exactly? GIFs, also know as Graphics Interchange Format, is a file type attributed to Compuserve/Steven Whilhite in 1987. You can think of a GIF as a digital flip book, for the file takes a video and compresses it into a series of images that then play at a rapid speed. Since GIFs are read as image data rather than video data, there are benefits for storage.

Why Pilates GIFs?

My desire to create GIFs of Pilates exercises was inspired by my time in teacher training. Our prime references for exercises included a textbook with expository descriptions of the exercises, images, and short form videos of the exercise being demoed. While these modalities are important and helpful to learning and developing your own understanding a vocabulary as a teacher, I felt that they did not provide me with the full story of the exercise, especially dimensionally.

As with many of my multimedia explorations, my foundational goal is to utilize technology to capture exercises and movement in a more robust way that more accurately expresses and displays the exercises' technique to viewers. GIFs are a simple and incredibly effective way to do this, especially if you can capture these exercise from multiple angles.

I saw a lot of opportunity to GIF-ize exercises under this goal: use them as a learning resource for those in teacher training, as a fun way to sequence classes, or to use in presentations or as a reference for your own personal practice. I hope that providing options across a variety of modalities will be able to increase the reach of the Pilates practice, but also the depth of its learning by practitioners and instructors.

How is it Made

The GIFs are made by taking the synchronized videos and laying them out in a video editing software (Premiere). They are then exported as videos and run through an open-source GIF creator to process them efficiently for the web.

Check out some of the GIFs below, and the full library HERE, for a small $1 donation

Resources

• Video I used to learn how to synchronize videos

• Giphy website